


You Have To Break To Build Yourself Back Up

by Analinea



Series: Living Without Your Name [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: (I'm not sure about that one but better to tag anyway just in case), Angst, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Nightmares, PTSD, Post-Nogitsune, Psychological Torture, Psychological Trauma, getting better, in the past
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-22
Updated: 2016-04-22
Packaged: 2018-06-03 18:26:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6621439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Analinea/pseuds/Analinea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scott's here when you finally break down. He went through most of his grief, the pain of losing someone loved still there -always there, you know- but easier to bear. You? You never let yourself have the time to do the same. There was so much to take care of anyway. Before you knew it, months went by and the storm calmed down. Peace finally settled on the town. There was nothing to sustain your denial, not that your mind didn't make a desperate effort to try. So what was left to do if not crumble?</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Have To Break To Build Yourself Back Up

**Author's Note:**

> I know I'm an angst lover and I can't write anything else (that's a lie, I could write fluff I just don't have the ideas for it), but this one feels particularly angsty even to me! But! There's light at the end!  
> There's no real need to read the first part to understand this one, but the last paragraph is clearer if you read the last one from Isaac's story!  
> ps: I edited some grammar error that escaped me, if I forgot some feel free to point it out! Also, I might come back to this story to rewrite it someday.  
> Enjoy!

You wake up mouth wide open on a scream that never get past your squeezed lungs. You're out of breath, your throat burns. But you stayed silent outside the nightmare. Slowly, you uncoil all the tense muscles of your body, try to escape the burning heat of the covers just to dive back in when the cold night air chills your sweat drenched skin. You turn your head, bravely get an arm back out to light up the clock. Red numbers read 3:42am. You wonder when this hell will end.

 

Scott's here when you finally break down. He went through most of his grief, the pain of losing someone loved still there -always there, you know- but easier to bear. You? You never let yourself have the time to do the same. Tried to convince yourself that _she_ never was that close of a friend anyway -that's so wrong it didn't work the first and last time you used this lie on yourself- then that you didn't have the right to hurt as much as Scott who lost his love -but it still hurts so bad- and your last genius idea: “It's already behind us.”

 

Notice how you didn't say “me”? Yeah, that's right. Because everybody else took the time to heal and you just pretended everything was fine under their worried glances. There was so much to take care of anyway, a constant stream of adrenaline in your veins to keep you going. Derek disappeared, became a teen for a while, then murders, Kate, Peter, Liam. Before you knew it, months went by and the storm calmed down. Peace finally settled on the town. There was nothing to sustain your denial, not that your mind didn't make a desperate effort to try. So what was left to do if not (silently, explosively, delicately, violently, softly, screaming, screaming, screaming without a sound) crumble?

 

●

 

You wake up panting, turn your head to the side. Scott is next to you and already has his eyes open, a hand presented open between you, giving you a choice. You twist your whole body to lay on your side and put your trembling hand over his.

“Please.” you say hoarsely. You don't even know what you're asking as you squeeze your fingers together to stop the tears that already run free on your cheeks. He understands. He always do.

 

“What happened?” Scott asks, one morning. You know you're going to have to talk about it eventually. It's been three weeks since that morning you woke up not-screaming. You remember how your couldn't get out of bed, paralyzed until sunrise, then too fucking tired. Your dad was working, didn't find you there until the afternoon after he was called by your worried friends. The phone was too far away for you to answer, or you thought it was.

Since then, they took turns, dad and Scott, to make you eat, shower, be there when you wake up from a three hours tops trip to horrorland after spending as much time as possible wide awake. You can't keep this up, you know. You need to talk, eventually. So you close your eyes. You hope you'll keep breathing through the memories.

 

●

 

_There's you, twenty-something, ringing the doorbell of your house. You don't live here anymore. Who opens the door? A woman with dark curly hair and a big smile while she says your name. You can only watch from the outside this version of the world where your mom never started acting strangely, never started forgetting things as they went, having a worse attention span than yours. A world where she still knows your name._

 

_There's images. A montage of MRI shots of a brain with its frontal and temporal cortices withering and dying in accelerated time. The name on it is “Stiles” Stilinski. You don't know who that is._

 

_A sword. Scott. Being sane or close to it for two days. Eichen House. A game of go. Howling. You're dying and you don't want to -but you want to if it stops the deaths, the pain, oh god- and pain. Nothing compared to what it was like inside your head (blazing, scorching, ripping, crushing pain) so you say it's okay. It's not. You kept going, but even out of hell there's only agony._

 

●

 

You wake up on the floor with a pounding headache. You vaguely remember voices trying to calm you down but failing where they usually succeeded. You passed out. Nothing like the good old memory of lonely panic attacks.

Except you're not alone anymore. You still can't quite wrap your head around that. You have to realize that your friends, your dad, they are here. They are real. The lifetime you spent in your mind losing them one after the other never existed. You didn't die of old age with no one to listen to your last words. But this life now still doesn't feel as real as the other. When you count your fingers, you're surprised that ten means it's real.

 

You close your eyes on the couch, next to your father. On the screen, the Good walks in the desert. You open your eyes on the couch, next to your father. The Ugly is running around in a cemetery. The skin of your face feels tight. You cried, long enough ago that your cheeks are dry.

“You didn't make a sound.” your dad says without looking at you. He knows you wouldn't bear to be looked at right now. “What did you dream about?”

“Mom, yelling that I tried to kill her.” you say like talking about a shelf needing dusting. No point in lying. “It's alright,” you add in the silence that follows, “I know it was the disease.” The colors are faded now. This photograph has been out in the sun too long. Its edges are still sharp enough to cut, though.

 

●

 

_It wasn't only a life you'll never get to have. It wasn't only growing old alone. Never just taunting you with your mother's eyes still aware or torturing you with losing everyone to things so human like infarctus, car crashes or getting a cramp in a swimming pool and drowning._

_No, sometimes it was small dark places, flickering red lights, walking barefoot on broken glass to get away from the screams. You tried to get to them, to help, once. Those are images you'll never forget._

 

●

 

You kind of remember waking up chocked by bandages, blinded and restrained by foreign hands as voices that should have been familiar shouted on the other side of the cocoon around your head. You saw light again and a face you hadn't seen in years. You tried “Scott?”, the name foreign in your mouth.

By the time Melissa was trying not to let show how wary she was of touching you, you had marked down the McCalls as still alive. You supposed -hoped- everyone else was too. Then Noshiko asked “Do you recognize me?” and it was funny. You saw the Nogitsune memories. She was more familiar than your best friend, right then.

 

When you look in a mirror, you still try to shake off the feeling that it's not you you're looking at. The first time you saw yourself again, really saw without avoiding looking in your own eyes and staying less than a second in front of your reflection, you panicked. That single second of not recognizing yourself, that sped up heartbeat it caused, you pushed it back immediately, like you did for everything else provoking guilt and pain (you still can't really hear _her_ name without wanting to stop living right here and there).

That night, you woke up at 3:42am not-screaming and finally understood that all these months it wasn't your clothes not fitting you. It was your body not fitting your clothes. Not fitting _you_.

 

●

 

You receive texts from the others from time to time, enough to see that you're not forgotten but not so much that you feel crowded. You couldn't really get visits during all this time, spiralling into flashbacks of memories that you can't hold back anymore. Feeling loved helps.

You can sleep more and more through the night. You know that you're protected outside of your dreams, and little by little that protection extends to the nightmares. It's not much yet, but it's something.

You also eat more, and just know you're starting to realized exactly how much it wasn't enough before. Something tells you that behind most of the meals you get there's advices from Melissa. You suddenly ache for her presence, even if you know you can't see her just yet, not when she reminds you so much of your own mom and the life-you-never-had.

 

All of that is progress. It's what you tell yourself when you sit on the edge of your bed staring at the floor and wondering why you can't make yourself get up. When you avoid looking in the mirror. When you can't look at Scott because it makes you think about- about _her_ and guilt makes you drown. In those moments, you try to remember the progress you've made. Remember that just yesterday you smiled.

 

●

 

_One night you dream about women with dark hair and bright dimpled smiles. You don't remember what's been said when you wake up but you feel tears running down the sides of your head. The strange part is: you're not sad. This ache in your heart, it's not pain._

 

●

 

Touch after touch, smile after smile. You'll never be the same again, but at least you build yourself back up on solid foundations this time.

You learned at a young age that monsters are not under the bed, they're inside the ones you love and take your family from you without pity, leaving you to watch them die from an unseen disease with no cure. You learned later that monsters are human shaped. Sometimes they can shift too. You learned the hard way what they can do.

Somewhere along the way you forgot that sometimes you're your own monster, having to deal with the consequences of what others did to you. That they are invisible diseases inside your brain and not all fights are about saving the town. The hardest fight is saving yourself, and the sweetest victory is seeing your loved ones look at you with smiles in their eyes. Happy that they didn't loose you.

 

●

●

●

 

One day Scott comes in with a box in his hands and the rest of the Pack trailing after him. On the box there's indications the package is from France. You laugh. That scarf wearing bastard that has no imagination when it comes to fake facebook names. Scott, Lydia and you agreed to let him be for as long as he needed it.

Scott opens it and inside there's a letter that he reads with a wavering voice. You never knew Isaac could be so poetic, you try to thing sarcastically as you wipe tears from your eyes before anyone sees them. Your sniffling gives you away.

The postcard shows bright colored buildings, and inside the box there's gifts attached to each of the cards Isaac sent. There's nothing for Liam or Mason, but Isaac couldn't have guessed there would be an addition to the Pack.

Derek is here to huff at his card and hide a smile. Scott called him three days ago, when you felt better and ready to see everyone again, to ask him if he would come back to spend some time with the Pack.

You approach the box, somewhat afraid of what you will find attached to the Little Girl card. The laughs of everyone else confirm your fear, and you look inside. The card is there. Nested inside a gray scarf.

You pick it up, fake grumbling, and you pretend to be offended when Scott laughs and take it from your hands to wrap it around your neck.

“It's too hot to wear a scarf!” you say, and you're a little scared that it will be too reminiscent of bandages around your head and send you into panic and flashbacks. But it's not. It's soft and airy, and you blush a little as you push it up to hide your face in it.

It smells like Isaac and the sea despite the travel. You look in the box again at everyone shouts of wonder. Hidden by the scarf before, there's tens of little stones of polished glass at the bottom of it.

" _this is what pain will become eventually after a lot of tears and time"_

 

You pick a green one up and look at the sunlight through it. You smile. Throw it in the air and catch it again, feeling its weight. You barely feel it. You think that your heart will be this light again, some day. You think you'll be okay. You all will.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I am only imagining the hint of Stisaac at the end? I feel like it could evolve into Stisaac haha 
> 
> Kudos are the light of my day, and if you have the time to post even the smallest comment I will be so happy!  
> You can always come by my [tumblr](http://kinsbournescream.tumblr.com/) to talk or give me a fluffy idea to write next! (I'm working on a half angst half kinda fluff thing, so there's progress haha)  
> Depending on the comments, I'm gonna try to do a story for Scott and one for Lydia!


End file.
